Take a look: hogwash has a new face. Not so new, really, just been hanging out on my desktop for about three months now, apparently waiting for the perfect moment to be uploaded. When I flipped my calendar to July, I panicked and decided it was time. The photo the header is based on has been around since April 1st, 2006, when we decided to move to Seattle.

When it all went down, I was at Pike Place Market with Kathy. My husband called from across town with the news about his job, and I clapped and squealed. I’ll come here every day, I thought, looking around the market. But of course I don’t do that now.

Rachel is the pig at the entrance to Pike Place Market, a 20-something-year-old icon of a 100-year-old institution. Rachel was there when we decided to move to Seattle. Moments before my husband’s call, I’d taken an incriminating photograph of a little girl sticking her finger up Rachel’s nose:

When I started hogwash, I wanted a name that was emblematic of what I’d been writing about, food and life, and also of Seattle. The market served as an obvious starting point. But I didn’t want to get too serious. It is all hogwash, these here words. Rachel seemed to fit my purpose. She’s just been sorta shy about coming out onto the big screen.

A few months ago, I finally took a deep breath and put my technological ego (or lack thereof) aside and brought Rachel to meet my computer nemesis: Photoshop. I eventually gussied up that photo of her being molested, and in the end, decided not to include the child’s finger. It’s cute in a giggly sort of way, but when decision time came, I ended up agreeing with my friend Michaela: perhaps not everyone wants to associate their dinner with pig’s snot.

(It’s also worth noting that this could have very easily been me as a child. I touched everything.)

So that’s it: the genesis of the pig at the top of the screen. And a better-looking blog, I think. (Don’t talk to me about that first h, it just doesn’t want to be included in its entirety.)

Someday a new and improving personal website will round it all out. I wish I could stick my finger up my computer‘s nose.